He was on a Marylebone-bound train, returning to London after having taken the morning off: care leave, he’d claimed it, though Lamb preferred ‘bloody liberty’.
‘We’re not the social services.’
‘We’re not Sports Direct either,’ Catherine Standish had pointed out. ‘If River needs the morning off, he needs it.’
‘And who’s gonna pick up his workload in the meantime?’
River hadn’t done a stroke of work in three weeks, but didn’t think this a viable line of defence. ‘It’ll get done,’ he promised.
And Lamb had grunted, and that was that.
So he’d taken off in the pre-breakfast rush, battling against the commuter tide; heading for Skylarks, the care home where the O.B. now resided; not precisely a Service-run facility – the Service had long since outsourced any such frivolities – but one which placed a higher priority on security than most places of its type.
The Old Bastard, River’s grandfather, had wandered off down the twilit corridors of his own mind, only occasionally emerging into the here and now, whereupon he’d sniff the air like an elderly badger and look pained, though whether this was due to a brief awareness that his grasp on reality had crumbled, or to that grasp’s momentary return, River couldn’t guess. After a lifetime hoarding secrets the old spook had lost himself among them, and no longer knew which truths he was concealing, which lies he was casting abroad. He and his late wife, Rose, had raised River, their only grandchild. Sitting with him in Skylarks’ garden, a blanket covering the old man’s knees, an iron curtain shrouding half his history, River felt adrift. He had followed the O.B.’s footsteps into the Secret Service, and if his own path had been forcibly rerouted, there’d been comfort in the knowledge that the old man had at least mapped the same territory. But now he was orphaned. The footsteps he’d followed were wandering in circles, and when they faltered at last, they’d be nowhere specific. Every spook’s dream was to throw off all pursuers, and know himself unwatched. The O.B. was fast approaching that space: somewhere unknowable, unvisited, untagged by hostile eyes.
It had been a warm morning, bright sunshine casting shadows on the lawn. The house was at the end of a valley, and River could see hills rising in the distance, and tame clouds puffing across a paintbox sky. A train was briefly visible between two stretches of woodland, but its engines were no more than a polite murmur, barely bothering the air. River could smell mown grass, and something else he couldn’t put a name to. If forced to guess, he’d say it was the absence of traffic.
He sat on one of three white plastic chairs arranged around a white plastic table, from the centre of which a parasol jutted upwards. The third chair was vacant. There were two other similar sets of furniture, one unused, the other occupied by an elderly couple. A younger woman was there, addressing them in what River imagined was an efficient tone. He couldn’t actually hear her. His grandfather was talking loudly, blocking out all other conversation.
‘That would have been August fifty-two,’ he was saying. ‘The fifteenth, if I’m not mistaken. A Tuesday. Round about four o’clock in the afternoon.’
The O.B.’s memory was self-sharpening these days. It prided itself on providing minute detail, even if that detail bore only coincidental resemblance to reality.
‘And when the call came in, it was Joe himself on the line.’
‘… Joe?’
‘Stalin, my boy. You’re not dropping off on me, are you?’
River wasn’t dropping off on him.
He thought: this is where life on Spook Street leads. Not long ago the old man’s past had come barking from the shadows and taken large bites out of the present. If this were common knowledge, there would be many howling for retribution. River should be among them, really. But if his own murky beginnings had turned out to be the result of the O.B.’s tampering with the lives of others, they remained his own beginnings. You couldn’t argue yourself out of existence. Besides, there was no way of taking his grandfather to task for past sins now those sins had melted into fictions. The previous week, River had heard a story the old man had never told before, involving more gunfire than usual, and an elaborate series of codenames in notebooks. Ten minutes on Google later revealed that the O.B. had been relaying the plot of
When the old man’s tale wound itself into silence, River said, ‘Do you have everything you need, Grandad?’
‘Why should I need anything? Eh?’
‘No reason. I just thought you might like something from …’
